When the Tide Goes Out - Film screening and Q&A

The documentary When the Tide Goes Out unravels the little-known history of radical political cultures of the South Asian diaspora in British Columbia in the long sixties. 

It combines a rich archive of cultural production with oral history interviews, offering a counterpoint to singular histories of ethno-religious diasporic communities. By foregrounding cross-ethnic and cross-racial solidarities forged in the labour and cultural movement in which artists and activists of many other Left-wing political and cultural movements participated, it alludes to a broader activism universe of the period. 

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Four decades later, memories of activism uncover the presence of gender inequality and sexism in struggles as well as in society at large. While women carried the burden of both outside and domestic work, they were also the ones to experience sexism and doubly discriminated when contending with the ‘social shame’ of protesting or speaking out against violent husbands. The interiority of women’s lives and the gendered experience of activism and organizing are missing from the archive and collective memory. 

The film becomes an endeavour to address this absence and reconstitute the collective memory of the migrant community while looking at social tensions within and without. It provides a sense of how migrants struggled to make a home by fighting racism and class and gender inequalities in which women experienced double discrimination.

About the speaker

Ajay Bhardwaj is a filmmaker and scholar whose work explores the relationship between aesthetic and subversive, art and identity, and history and memory. As a documentary filmmaker, he has explored the northwestern state of Punjab in India for over a decade. Out of this he made a Punjab trilogy—a set of documentaries located at the intersection of Dalit religiosity, performance traditions, and memories of partition. 

Bhardwaj is a recipient of the Public Scholars Award at the University of British Columbia, where he completed his PhD on South Asian Left-wing cultural activism in British Columbia. 'When the Tide Goes Out' is part of his doctoral research that examines representational absences in multimedia archive. Ajay is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University, Canada. 

This event is held jointly by Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies & SOAS South Asia Insitute. 

Image credit: Craig Berggold